When a friend disappears

The first thing I wondered when I met the woman I’ll call Holly was how I could get away from her. This had nothing to do with Holly. She seemed nice enough as she welcomed me into what we would quickly begin to call “our” room. We were at a writer’s conference and had been randomly assigned to live together for 11 days, dorm-style. Our twin beds sat side by side, a small night table between them, upon which Holly had already placed a clock.

From this near distance, we would sleep and wake and dress together, toting toiletries to the communal bathroom. I’d been looking forward to the conference for months, but the prospect of living in such close proximity to a stranger was less appealing. I’m extroverted by nature but also deeply solitary, the host who almost always wishes even her most beloved guests would leave before they do, a woman who, before my kids, had gone days without company and felt perfectly fine.

“How about we make an agreement?” I almost asked in those first moments, about to suggest we designate hours of the day when each of us could have the room to ourselves. But I was too busy talking and laughing as we unpacked our things. Within minutes, the polite conversation of strangers morphed into the flow of two women who had seemingly known one another forever. An hour later, a bell rang, calling us to dinner, but we talked right through it, too engrossed in each other to care.

And we kept doing that, becoming the kind of friends neither of us had had since we were children. Each night was a slumber party, as we told our life stories from the dark of our respective beds, asking and listening and delving deeply into our sorrows and secrets and joys until we couldn’t bear to stay awake another minute. By the conference’s end, I knew her better than I did most of my longtime friends.

“We’re kindred spirits!” we marveled, though on the surface we were opposites. She was mother to a teenager; I was childless. She’d been in a stable marriage for years, and I was recently remarried after stumbling my way through a divorce. We’d grown up in different ethnic cultures, in different landscapes, in utterly different parts of the country—she amid palm trees and sandy beaches, me in the frigid Midwest. Even physically, we were a study in contrasts: she, dark-haired and petite; I, blonde and strapping.

But in all the ways that mattered, we were the same. We laughed at the same things, felt enraged by the same world woes, held the same values. Our meeting was the beginning of a romance of sorts, though without the slightest hint of sexual tension, a new love we didn’t doubt was here to stay.

After the conference, we kept in touch long-distance for nearly four years, continuing in a more workaday fashion the friendship that had begun so potently. The miles between us didn’t matter, nor did the fact that we never managed to visit each other despite our best intentions. We were connected more deeply than that, our friendship not reliant on things we did together but through the frequent conversations, letters and e-mail we shared. Every few months, we’d exchange packages in the mail, scented candles and herbal teas that Holly had arranged in a basket for me; for her, a book I knew she’d love.

The last time we spoke, I was waiting impatiently for the days to tick by so I could take a home pregnancy test, madly hoping that my husband and I had conceived. In that conversation, Holly was like she’d always been—funny, sweet and kind. Before hanging up, she made me promise to tell her about the results of the test as soon as I found out. A week later, I e-mailed her with the good news—pregnant! And then, only a day or two after that, with the bad: I’d miscarried. Neither e-mail elicited a reply. Odd, I thought, but she would call soon to console me, I believed, or a box of her homemade cookies and a stylish card would arrive for me in the mail.

I was wrong, but still I didn’t make much of it. I went on vacation, and then, before I knew it, a month had passed. We were two busy women with full lives. I certainly didn’t take Holly’s lack of contact personally. I left her a voice mail—”Call when you get the chance”—feeling not even the slightest resentment that she’d been out of touch. She didn’t call back.

And so it went, as spring passed into summer, her silence continuing. This is peculiar, I finally thought. I wrote, I called, I e-mailed. I shifted from being slightly offended to deeply worried about her; from hurt to angry to confused. Still, it wasn’t impossible for me to excuse her behavior. I, too, had occasionally gone too long without returning calls or e-mail messages without the slightest ill intent. Holly was simply going through a strange time, I told myself. I would hear from her soon, she would explain it all and everything would be OK.

In the fall, six months after we’d last spoken, I happened to be visiting a town not a terribly long drive from her house. “Holly!” I said too cheerfully into the silence of her voice mail. “I’m here.” I recited my cell phone number over and over, then, worried that my message hadn’t gone through, called again and repeated my number once more. “I’m beginning to feel like a stalker,” I joked, but I wasn’t joking at all. With each passing day she didn’t contact me during that trip, I felt increasingly disturbed. I considered driving to her house, demanding she explain why she’d disappeared. I was hurt and angered by her behavior, but even more, it was the bewilderment I wanted most to express. Why, why, why? I imagined shouting, forcing her to hear and respond.

I didn’t have the slightest idea what the answer might be, and there was no one, besides Holly herself, I could ask. She wasn’t connected to anyone I knew. Instead, I was left with my imagination, which, in the absence of any logical explanations, veered toward the far-fetched. Perhaps a tragedy had struck her family and she was so devastated that she’d had to abandon everyone she’d known before. Perhaps she had developed amnesia and forgotten me. More often, I questioned my own role. Had I said something that caused offense? I combed through my memory, reconstructing our last conversations, trying to recall every comment that she could have interpreted as a slight. I came up with nothing. I thought about the few people we mutually knew from the conference, suspiciously wondering if one had told Holly a lie about me so preposterous and awful that she couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge my existence ever again.

But I knew that none of these things was true. Holly was one of the most well-adjusted people I’d ever met, not given to extremes or drama. If tragedy had struck or I’d offended her in some way, it would be entirely uncharacteristic of her to shut me out. The most reasonable explanation I could come up with was that Holly was dead and her husband hadn’t contacted me. So I periodically Googled her, dreading I’d find her obituary. Instead I found Holly, living her usual life, publishing the occasional story, competing in local road races and placing in the top 10 in her age group in just about every one she ran.

Nine months after our last conversation, I wrote her a letter, begging her to respond. I assured her she didn’t have to be my friend but asked her to please tell me why she’d made this choice, to explain even generally, so I could move on with some understanding. I promised I’d never contact her again. Nevertheless, a month later, I e-mailed, then sent a card. I alternated direct appeals for an explanation with cheerful bits of news—I’m pregnant! I sold my novel!—as if pretending that things were normal would make them so. Not one was answered or returned. Holly was receiving them, I was certain. She simply wouldn’t reply.

Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I’d lost friends, mostly as the result of distance or too little time. A few friendships ended more explosively, because of conflicts or betrayals. But I’d never literally lost a friend. Holly was gone.

Gone, and yet still there. I didn’t know where or how to place our friendship in the narrative of my life. When I come across the names of friends I’ve drifted away from in my address book, I feel a surge of warmth and goodwill, a pulse of possibility that we might someday connect again. The few people with whom I’ve intentionally severed ties also exist on a definable plane, the reasons our relationships flourished and then died out comprehensible to me. Nothing about what happened with Holly was comprehensible. Why had she disappeared from my life? Aside from her bizarre silence, which has lasted for four years now, there has been no formal end to our friendship, nothing I know to have caused its demise. And so, in a way, it remains, not as a friendship but a mystery, one that, alone and without the slightest explanation, I’ve had to live with.

Over time, I’ve gradually accepted things as they are. That’s as close as I can get to resolution. I don’t send Holly letters anymore. It’s been ages since I’ve Googled her. She’s gone, and so I’ve had to let her go. Yet there are still times I replay it in my mind, the questions changing over the years. In the early days of our estrangement, my sole concern was trying to understand why Holly wasn’t my friend anymore, whether it was something I’d done, if there was some way I could make it right. Recently, I’ve wondered how much my giving love depends on my getting it in return. Could I separate my love for Holly from her lack of love for me? Must I stop loving her simply because she chose to withdraw herself from my life?

The answer isn’t clear-cut. Even if she wanted to be friends again, I doubt I’d take Holly back. When I refer to her now, it’s as a former friend who did me wrong. And yet there is a place inside me that exists apart from what she did, an alternate universe in which the lovely friendship we shared and the ugly way it ended don’t cancel each other out. I’ve decided it is possible to keep Holly near while letting her go. In my mind she’s both a dear old friend who just happens to no longer be in my life and a woman I only thought I knew.